Sci-Fi, Keyboards and DLC

You know I can’t decide if the last week has gone quickly or slowly for me but either way one thing I have done in the past week is play plenty of video games. I tried to make a start on Mass Effect 2 again on insanity difficulty but it quickly became obvious it was just going to be far too challenging for me so I’ll probably just finish up a few achievements and leave the game. It’s not that Mass Effect 2 didn’t provide a huge amount of content but the game was so good I wish there was even more for me to explore and do in the game, it could be a long time until Mass Effect 3.

 In the future every game will be a movie.

I found it more than a little ironic that soon after mentioning briefly last week that on the surface Mass Effect seems like it would make a great movie but that may not be the reality, I learned the news of Legendary Pictures acquiring the rights to a Mass Effect movie. Now of course them acquiring the rights by no means this movie will be made, there’s been no sign of video game movies like Metroid, Gears of War or Bioshock and I for one am rather thankful for it. Naturally when you make a game into a movie you take away what makes it a game but I believe in some ways a Mass Effect movie may be an even bigger mistake than other video game-movie adaptations. To reiterate what I said last week the whole point of the story side of Mass Effect is that your actions have a direct impact on the game world. The look, sex and personality of Shepard, who Shepard romances, who lives and who dies and to an extent even the politics of the universe are all consequences of choices you have made and when you start trying to fill in those blanks you suck the life out of the story of Mass Effect. Let’s hope that movie never gets made. I could rant on endlessly about video game movies but I’ll leave that for another blog.

 The new Rock Band peripheral?

One news item of particular interest to me this week was Harmonix’s teaser that Rock Band 3 will contain keyboard support. I had assumed this was coming for a while because after a public comment to them about Guitar Hero’s MIDI keyboard support they said more or less that they were making sure they had the right way to do keyboard before they tried anything. Exactly what form keyboard support will come in is somewhat of a mystery at this stage but considering that it’s shown alongside the other four main instruments I don’t think it’s overly-presumptuous to assume it’s playable for at least some of the songs on the main soundtrack. If this is true then it’s an interesting direction to go in, as a player of the piano (although not a very good one) the chance to experience it as part of Rock Band is an exciting prospect but can they really find that many songs spanning all genres and periods of rock music that contain keyboard? I keep thinking about it and yet I don’t seem to be able to engineer any answer more concrete than “perhaps”. It will be interesting to see more information on this.

Back to what I’ve been playing, I finished up the Fallout 3 DLC Broken Steel and played through Operation Anchorage as well as completing a couple more of the side quests in the main game. It took me some time to adjust to Fallout after playing Mass Effect but I eventually got back into it and had a good time with Broken Steel. Operation Anchorage was less enjoyable but overall I felt neither of the DLC packs matched up to the quality of the original game. From what I’ve heard Broken Steel is about as good as it gets and if that’s how it is I’m fine with it but I’ve still got three more DLC packs to go. You can find my review of Operation Anchorage here. I also finished up Portal for about the hundredth time (not literally of course) and have finally written up a review which you can catch here.

I hope you all have had an enjoyable past week and I wish you many more to come, thank you for reading and I will leave you with this perplexing and yet magical image taken from a Korean soap opera:

-Gamer_152